412 TWING B. WIGGINS 



picture of the disease, which is well-nigh complete, and a treat- 

 ment which is essentially that of to-day. 



Jacob Bigelow, of Boston, was one of the most distinguished 

 of the doctors of the last century. Born in 1787 and dying in 

 1879, his life of ninety two years embraced all the greatest 

 events of our country's history. He was wonderful as an old 

 man, with a mind keen and alert to the end. What he did 

 made an enormous impression upon the community and upon 

 the profession. The friend of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, 

 Daniel Webster, and the familiar of Lincoln and Grant, he was 

 ever a promotor of reforms, municipal, social, educational and 

 scientific. At the age of thirty, he was chosen professor of 

 materia medica and botany in Harvard college, and held the 

 chair for forty years. Later he was the first Rumford pro- 

 fessor and lecturer on the application of science to the useful 

 arts at Harvard. He published an elaborate series of volumes 

 under the title, "American Medical Botany," which not only 

 covered the ground in an exhaustive way, but is distinguished 

 by an elaborate system of plates, designed and largely executed 

 by the author. He was an editor of the first edition of the 

 United States Pharmacopoeia, published in 1820, and did much 

 to simplify the nomenclature. In 1832 he founded Mount 

 Auburn cemetery, the first extra urban forest cemetery, after 

 much agitation. Not only this, but he laid out the grounds, 

 surveyed roads and paths, and designed the ornamentation. 

 He became thus the first of our landscape architects. He 

 should be remembered above all for the great reforms he in- 

 stituted in the practice of medicine. He was early led to a 

 habit of observation and just conclusion and to a belief in the 

 self limited character of disease. In an address on "Self Lim- 

 ited Diseases" delivered before the Massachusetts Medical 

 society in 1835, he struck the keynote, and the effect was far 

 reaching in promoting the radical change in medical practice 

 which has prevailed among us for two generations, and which 

 has popularly been ascribed to homoeopathy. 



He urged upon his students in 1852 the great importance 

 of a thorough scientific training, twenty years before that be- 

 ginning of reform in medical education in America, which was 

 initiated by Harvard in the early seventies. He urged longer 



